Family secrets lie at the end of a twisted path

The House of Widows

A Novel

Askold Melnyczuk

Graywolf Press: 258 pp.,

$16 paper

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From its puzzling opening line (“The most common grammatical error is the lie”), there’s an ominous vibe to Askold Melnyczuk’s third novel, “The House of Widows,” and the sense of unease lingers until the final sentence. It’s a mysterious, masterfully taut story in which dread plays a prominent role.

James Pak is a divorced, brooding 40-year-old “trapped, like so many, in the weather of the past,” on a mission to sort through the details surrounding his father Andrew’s suicide.

It’s 2006 -- 16 years to the week since Andrew’s death -- and James walks the streets of Vienna, where he lives, recalling that before his father killed himself, he gave his only son a letter “in a language he knew I couldn’t read.” The remaining sum of James’ inheritance is his father’s British military ID card and a cracked glass jar.

An expatriate historian who works by day at the U.S. Embassy, James is obsessed by his family’s Ukrainian roots, a story filled with lacunas and layers of deceit.

He also carries his own burdens and secrets, which are slowly revealed. “Only among the guilty do I ever breathe free,” he says.

Shortly before Andrew killed himself, he abandoned James’ mother after 30 years of marriage. James feels guilty and anguished, convinced that he drove his father to both acts because he’d begun relentlessly grilling the distraught, laconic, hard-drinking Andrew about his paternal grandmother, Vera, and asking other questions about the family’s past. (James was always told, falsely, that Vera was dead.)

Still, James says, “I’d set something in motion I had to see through to its end.” And though he feels somewhat responsible for his father’s death -- “I went at him like a prosecuting attorney” -- he defends his aggressive curiosity: “How could I keep from becoming my father if I didn’t know who he was?”

From the start, James is a haunted figure, as are those he encounters, all of whom maintain a protective emotional scrim. His story unfolds mostly in flashback, and because the narrative skips around in time it serves to disorient the reader further about the sources of his profound sadness.

A trip to England from his hometown of Boston when he was 25, just after his father dies, proves transformative. James learned much about his family’s disturbing, unsavory past and the answers to everything he’d wondered about (including the meaning of that cracked glass jar). He goes to Oxford and stays with a woman named Marian, a childhood friend of his father’s. (As is the case with most of the utterances in this novel, that’s only half-true.)

Marian is kind to James, but her two brothers, Bulwer and Aidan, are undeniably creepy. Still, her replies to even the most benign questions are elusive and vague (“In a way, I suppose,” is a typical response).

James notes her discomfort with his queries and senses that things are not quite what they appear to be: “She folded her hands in her lap and looked down. Some strong feeling had taken hold. A thought moved over her face like a boat rowing slowly across a lake.”

Melnyczuk is a master at sustaining intrigue; the waiting is delightfully agonizing rather than tedious. He writes so precisely about secrets and betrayals that a reader’s desire for instant gratification seems like a cheap impulse worth letting go of.

Indeed, the journey itself is a pleasure, and the connections among the characters turn out to be far more shocking than expected.

Marian’s other tenant, Selena, is a volatile young Palestinian woman with whom James becomes romantically involved; she too has a damaging past and much that is concealed. He knows only that Selena is like a daughter to Marian, whose own daughter died in a car accident. Though their affair is brief, her effect on him is profound.

After James visits Vera and learns more about his relatives and also about Marian’s own family history, all the pieces of the puzzle unexpectedly come together -- including the meaning of the novel’s title.

This is not an easy narrative, emotionally or structurally -- but those who persist will be rewarded by its rich detail and satisfying conclusion. That Melnyczuk manages to bring together so many strands of plot, all revealed and pondered through the troubled, fascinating psyche of James, is remarkable.

Not only does the author explore the consequences of secrets in the context of personal history, but he also delves into how governmental cover-ups, especially in wartime, destroy lives. It’s a beautiful novel and redemptive in its own way -- even though, by the end, the protagonist is left bruised by life’s harsh and undeniable truths.

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Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of several anthologies of poetry, including “First Loves” and “Solitude.”